Program

Keynote Speakers

Workshops

We are happy to share that we will be having four workshops in parallel sessions on days one and two of the conference. To learn more about each workshop, please click on the titles below.

Dancing puzzle: reconstructing a dance through collective kinesthetic memory.

Led by Diego Mar¨ªn Bucio

Description of Workshop: The participants will try to reconstruct a dance previously given using non-verbal communication. The session will transit through different stages playing with multimodal attention to explore the mechanisms underlying kinesthetic memory. The workshop aims to explore the core spatial-temporal dimensions of dance and practically engage with the concepts of co-creativity and kinetic melody.

Requirements: Comfortable clothes

Desirable skills: Basic dance experience

Coherence and Cause - Exploratory analysis strategies for physiological measurements from live concert participants

Led by Finn Upham, Ph.D.

Background: Concert research involves studying humans engaged in very complex activities: highly predictable but constantly changing stimuli experienced through multiple sensory modalities and socio-cultural constraints. Physiological measurements of audience members and musicians during such activities reflect that richness with substantial differences between participants, with substantial ambiguity around the contributions of the shared musical activity on their respective heart rates, respiratory sequences, and movement timing. Some analysis strategies treat this richness as noise around more obvious correlates identifiable in laboratory conditions (ex: loudness, listener arousal, and heart rate). Others invoke complex data-agnostic assessments of shared information to demonstrate the existence of synchronicity with little opportunity to investigate how intervals of coherence emerge, whether across a crowd or between performers and audience. 

Description of Workshop: This workshop presents a data-centric approach designed to facilitate the discovery and evaluation of causal connections between musical information and physiological events during concerts. With examples from audience motion and performer respiration, Finn will demonstrate this process of exploration, identification, and probabilistic evaluation and then share some data from past studies to be explored by attendees and discussed as a group. Key issues discussed will include:

•  Assessing the limits of a dataset, whether it can provide enough information to test for the phenomenon suggested. 
• Controlling the analysis sequence through identification and evaluation.
• Projecting the consequences of the identified phenomenon and performing orthogonal tests on the same or related datasets.
• Conditions for dropping the thread when the evidence doesn't hold up, and making the most of analysis mistakes.

Hypothesis-lead controlled experimental work may be the gold standard for building scientific knowledge, but there is more to discover than that which we already know to look for. Exploratory approaches that are sensitive to both the mechanisms of music production as well as the characteristics of measured physiological signals can expose patterns with more explanatory power than large-scale evaluations of coherence. 

Potential exploration datasets include:  
 - respiratory-cardiac interactions in brass players
 - laughter and concert audience motion
 - Applause textures, synchronous vs independence

Requirements/Equipment and software:

• Some way of plotting quantitative time series data from multicolumn csv files. At least one dataset will be small enough to handle easily in excel or google sheets. Demonstration jupyter notebooks will also be available for those interested.
• Installation of Sonic visualiser : https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

Human-Swarm Interactive Music Systems: Implementation and data analysis using Python

 Led by Pedro P. Lucas

Background:  A Human-Swarm Interactive Music System (IMS) is an improvisational system that allows users to interact with a swarm of self-organized artificial agents exhibiting emergence in a sound and music context. Research in this field can cover several aspects that involve the field of multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, and music technology, but not limited to them.

Description of Workshop: In this workshop, we will briefly introduce these types of systems and implement a basic real-time controller in Python for a 3D environment in which users can manipulate virtual musical agents. We will explain the use of OSC messages to communicate a Python program with this environment and how they can be used for real-time control. Additionally, we will collect data from this environment and show examples of how to analyze it. Furthermore, we will provide code templates to participants to facilitate the implementation of their own ideas.

The 3D setting to be used is a software tool intended for multi-agent systems with a user interaction focus, especially for sound and music applications that work with any programming language able to use OSC messages; in this case, we will use Python for such communication.

Requirements/Equipment and software:

• A laptop running Windows or MacOS (currently, the 3D software only supports these 2 operating systems.)
• The 3D software (HS-ims app)  https://github.com/pedro-lucas-bravo/human_swarm_examples/releases/tag/v1.0.0
• Python 3 with the following packages:
  • https://pypi.org/project/numpy/
  •  https://pypi.org/project/python-osc/

 Desirable Skills:

• Basic Python programming knowledge.
• Not required but nice to have: a background in 3D math.

Concert Listening: Qualitative, Phenomenological Inquiry

Led by  Dr. Remy Haswell-Martin

Background: Live music can afford novel, transformative aesthetic interactions for individual audience members. The concert hall is also a site of shared experience. Recent concert research work has involved collaborative, exploratory approaches to understanding audience experience and has taken a particular interest in embodied engagement and affective resonance. In RITMO-based concert research projects, we bring together qualitative and quantitative methods to explore shared and idiosyncratic patterns of aesthetic interaction in the concert hall. This combination offers a rich, in-depth vantage point to examine dynamic aspects of engagement that are typically hidden from view in settings, such as classical music concerts, that are known for stillness and silence. Data collected at research concerts involving the Danish String Quartet, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra, reveals absorbed involvement and listeners enacting meaningful perceptual and affective contact with musical performances.

Description of Workshop: Together we will explore the qualitative inquiry that forms part of the data rich approach we have taken to researching listening experience 'in the wild'. We will appraise the practice of conducting and analyzing interviews with audience members within a phenomenological framework. This involves working empirically with others' experiences (H?ffding et al., 2023) and emphasizes the integration of concepts from phenomenology (and related fields such as ecological theory and enactivism) with interview data. Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research protocol will be introduced, and we will consider how this has been applied in recent collaborative concert studies to explore embodied, imaginative, and existentially significant encounters with live music performance.

Required reading: 

H?ffding, S., Heimann, K. & Martiny, K. Editorial: Working with others' experience.  Phenom Cogn Sci , 22, 1¨C24 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09873-z

Program

Below is a preliminary draft of the SysMus25 conference program. Please note that we will provide a detailed conference program with specified time slots for presenters by April 14.

Day 1: Wednesday, June 11th

Day 2: Thursday, June 12th

Day 3: Friday, June 13th

Social Activities

Conference Dinner         

The conference dinner will be at  Barcode Street Food on Thursday June 12 at 18:30.
Please note that in lieu of a registration fee for SysMus25, we kindly request that conference attendees cover the cost of their own meal and drinks at the conference dinner. We estimate that dinner will cost about NOK 350 (approx. €30) per person.

Social Dances

We have arranged two beginner-friendly social dance classes for SysMus25!

• On Wednesday, June 11th from 18:30-19:30 we will have a "Welcome Swing Dance" where we will learn a basic swing dance. This will be led by Ioannis Theodoridis. The venue for this will be determined soon.
   
• On Friday, June 13th from 17:15-18:15 we will have a "Parting Springar Dance" where we will learn the basics of Springar , a traditional Norwegian folk dance. This will be led by Vilde Aaslid and will be held at the conference venue directly following the closing remarks.